How to Back Up Your iPhone to an External Hard Drive
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Select Return. Close Terminal. You've now made a symlink between the new folder and the old folder that contains your backup.
How to Back Up Your iPhone to an External Hard Drive
Free up space on your Mac's internal drive
By Jennifer Allen Jennifer Allen Writer Swansea University, Staffordshire University Jennifer Allen has been writing about technology since 2010. Her work has appeared in Mashable, TechRadar, and many more publications. lifewire's editorial guidelines Updated on October 9, 2022 Tweet Share Email Tweet Share EmailIn This Article
Expand Jump to a Section Find Your Current Backup on MacOS Move iPhone Backup to External Hard Drive Can You Change Where Your Mac Saves iPhone Backups Update Backup Location How to Tell if the Backup Worked Disable Automatic Backups Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat to Know
Go to Finder > Locations > select your iPhone> Manage Backups. Select a backup > Show in Finder.In Finder, drag the backup to the external drive in Locations.Or use Mac's admin settings and Terminal to permanently change the iPhone location backups. If you are in the habit of backing up your iPhone data to a Mac computer, you might find space is limited. While Apple doesn't make it easy to back up an iPhone to an external hard drive, it is possible. This guide shows you how to do so using iOS 13 and macOS Catalina (or later).How to Find Your Current Backup on MacOS
Because of the complexity, we've broken down what needs to be done before moving your iPhone backup to an external hard drive into multiple steps. First, you need to know where the backup is stored on your Mac. It's not hard to find. In the Mac Dock, select Finder. Go to the Locations section of Finder and choose your iPhone. If you use an older version of macOS than macOS Catalina, use iTunes to find your iPhone instead. Click Manage Backups. Long-press the Control key and click the backup name you want. It may be named "Backup" or it may be a long string of letters and numbers. In the drop-down menu, select Show in Finder. You've successfully tracked down the backup.How to Move iPhone Backup to an External Hard Drive
Now you've found your backup, you need to move it to your external hard drive. This step is pretty simple. Make sure your external hard drive is plugged in! Go to the Finder window that displays your iOS backup. Select the Backup folder. It will either be called Backup or consist of a series of numbers and letters. Drag it to the external hard drive under Locations in the Finder sidebar. You may have to enter your administrator password to do this. Rename the iOS backup folder on the external hard drive to ios_backup. Switch back to the original finder window and rename the old backup to old_backup. If you want, you can stop right there and repeat the process outlined above whenever you want to back up your iPhone to an external drive. If you are uncomfortable working with the Mac Terminal, that's probably your safest choice.Can You Change Where Your Mac Saves iPhone Backups
If you want, you can permanently change where the Mac saves your iPhone backups. The process involves being comfortable changing a few background settings on your Mac via the Terminal command. If you've never dealt with Terminal before, it can be intimidating as it's powerful and not exactly user-friendly. You can break how your Mac back ups your iPhone, so we recommend performing a full system backup via Time Machine first so you can retrace your steps if need be. Changing Mac's location for iPhone backups is the trickiest part of this process. To always have your iPhone back up to an external hard drive, you need to create a symlink so that your Mac knows where to look for future backups. Creating a symlink isn't essential as you can manually move your backups across, but it's much easier if you set up your Mac to do this automatically. Plus, it means you don't have to worry about having enough free space on your Mac's internal hard drive to perform the backup. It's not hard to change the location if you follow these steps, but it does require some concentration. You also need to change some permissions on your Mac first to get to the result.Update Permissions on Your Mac
Here's how to change those permissions. Click the Apple icon. Select System Preferences. Click Security & Privacy. Select Privacy. Click the Lock to make changes. Enter your admin password. Select Full Disk Access. Click the plus (+) sign. Scroll through your applications and select Terminal.Change iPhone Backup Locations
Now you've completed that step, here's how to change iPhone backup location on Mac. Open Terminal. Paste this code, ensuring you change the relevant parts to the name of your external hard drive. ln -s /Volumes/**yourexternalharddrivename**/ios_backup ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/Select Return. Close Terminal. You've now made a symlink between the new folder and the old folder that contains your backup.